Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 2 Comments

Darwin, Newton, and Me.

It’s so rare when a new form of stupidity surprises me in traffic it’s almost enjoyable when it occurs. Almost. The thing about traffic that some people seem to miss is traffic laws are a social construct that are transmutable, and the laws of physics are why people die in traffic, in horrible ways involving twisted metal, blunt force trauma, blood, fire, broken glass, and people behaving poorly after the event.

I would apologize for the digression, but honestly there seems to be a certain large proportion of the motoring population who do not understand the forces driving, no pun intended, vehicle accidents, and how to avoid these events. Rather, they seem bent, again, no pun intended, on daring Newtonian Physics to work against them.

Like Darwin, Newton has no fucks to give.

The car in front of me eases forward, we are both in the left turn lane at an intersection, Gornto and Saint Augustine, turning onto Gornto from the west, and all is well. There’s a line of cars behind me. Ahead is clear, the lead car has time to turn without tempting his particular god or Newton to smite him. He turns ever so slowly, and then inexplicably, he stops in midturn. 

Did he die? Did his car quit? Was he the one person in south Georgia that actually was Raptured? Did he stop to finish singing a Taylor Swift song about loss? I look forward. Cars are coming. I need an escape route if this gets any stranger.  Check mirrors, I can go straight into the left turn on the other side, illegal, scary, but the lesser of many evils, the greatest of those in traffic is not doing a goddamn thing when you could get the fuck out.

Get. Out.

Don’t stay with it. If someone is doing something stupid, just get away from them. Go. It doesn’t matter if you have to go ten miles to turn around, or if you miss your turn, or anything. Just go. Leave the circus, because Brother, I am here to tell you one thing for certain and that is stupid rarely self-cures and it most definitely gets worse before it gets any better.

The car eases forward, horns are honking now behind me, and the window of opportunity for escape is closing, but he is moving forward into the turn, and he stops. Again.

Now the only out is to pass him. It’s a single lane at that point, and to pass I have to go into the double left turn on Gornto, but that is still better than sitting still. Cars are coming towards me. The guy behind me is losing his mind; he is likewise trapped. I make eye contact with him in the rearview. “Follow me!” I send that thought and I am getting the hell away from all of this now.

Suddenly, the guy goes forward. Slowly, but forward, and I’m good, the guy behind me is good, but we’re the only two to escape. This guy in front is going ten miles an hour, but he’s moving.

He makes a right turn at Publix, and I am free. The guy behind me follows the offender into the parking lot. This might go poorly, but I am moving on.

I have never seen that form of stupidity before. It was amazing.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

All Preachers Are Grifters

Watching the cursor blink, waiting, waiting, the first sentence was going to read, “I don’t like preachers” which would have been accurate, but imperfectly so. Let us try this, shall we:

I dislike preachers.

Yes, that’s more to the point, stronger, and says what I want the sentence to say.

This morning, zero early hours, I’m in the waiting room at the doctor’s office to give blood for my yearly checkup. I hope I don’t have rabies. After almost dying a couple of years ago or so, I’m more than a little paranoid about getting looked at once a year.

            The waiting room fills up, like a wading pool of sickness and injury, and the room may or may not be a launching pad into the Great Unknown.

            A man is talking to a woman, and he’s loud. Loudly loud. He has a spiel. I’m under the impression these two have never met, but he keeps telling her how “blessed” she is and how “blessed” he is, and how “blessed” it is to be here, bless his heart.

            He laughs every time he finishes a sentence, as if he’s a comedian. And the laugh is the same laugh every time. It has four syllables, like Ha ha ha HA! With the last syllable accentuated. I stop reading to watch. He’s talking loud enough for everyone in the room to hear him, and when any preacher does this, he’s sharpening his knives.

            He asks the woman questions, “Where do you go to church Ha ha ha HA?”

            “Oh, I go over there on the west side of town, it’s Unified Christian Hypocrites, and. . .”

            “Do you like it there Ha ha ha HA?”

            “Oh yes, it’s a good church, we…”

            “Who is your pastor? Ha Ha Ha HA”

He’s not only pumping her for information, getting her to talk faster and faster to keep up with him, he’s also making her feel more and more like she should. Used car salesmen use this technique to work people into buying a car. It’s fast, effective, and slimy as the feel of a preacher’s hand on your shoulder.

But this is minor deception, a sort of exercise, warming him up for bigger game, and I can feel it. The only difference between a preacher and a homeless person lying to get a few bucks is the homeless person has to be somewhat honest; preachers tell the biggest and the most lies than anyone you will ever meet, and their livelihoods depend on their ability to be great liars. This man is good.

“Mr. Marshall?” the receptionist calls, and the preacher stands up, makes a fuss about saying good by to the woman and have a blessed day.

“I’m Reverend Marshall,” he says with just a trace of that judgmental tone of voice that she should have known that was his title but she was too sinful to be aware. I’m sitting close enough to hear him. So were you, if you were in the same zip code.

“Reverend Marshall, you’re a new patient, we’re going to need cash, or a credit card, or a cashier’s check for your first visit,” the receptionist tells him. There’s a sign on the wall that has this information on it, at eye level, in a 48 font, bold. I’m also sitting close enough for the fumes coming off Marshall to choke me. He’s wearing some sort of perfume, cloying, sweet, and powdery, like cotton candy scented drywall dust.

“The Lord takes care of me,” Marshall says loudly.

The receptionist is a woman who has heard it all before, even if she hasn’t heard this before, it doesn’t matter.

“Yes sir, I’m certain he does. You’re a new patient, we’re going to need cash, or a credit card, or a cashier’s check for your first visit,” she repeats, and doesn’t bat an eye.

“The Lord takes care of me,” Marshall says loudly. “Ha ha ha HA!”

The receptionist sits there, counts to ten, silently, and then repeats what she’s already said.

Marshall laughs and waits.

The receptionist cocks her head to one side, and waits.

Marshall pulls out his wallet and says, loudly, “Money is the root of all evil, ha ha ha HA!”

“Thank you, sir,”

I give three vials of blood to the phlebotomist, while Marshall is talking to a guy who looks older than me by half again. Marshall is doing his rapid fire question routine but the other guy is hard of hearing, and hilarity ensues.

I pick up my paperwork and leave the medical professionals to the circus that’s come to town.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Zebras in the Grocery Store.

The Christmas crowds are finally gone from the grocery stores, and the roads. A brief yet smaller wave of people who are not usually in the way will appear this weekend, disappear, and then we’ll be fine until Memorial Day, when the summer crowds begin. But for now, things are almost normal on the roads.

The parking lot of the store is free of the frantic frenzy of the holidays, and I scan the area, looking for free roaming humans. I try to get from the truck to the door without having to come in contact with people, and it’s strange no one else I know does this. I can’t control what happens at the door, but getting there, yes. I can avoid people to a large degree. Where I always park is key to this. I can go in three different directions, three paths, depending on where people are.

The panhandlers like to set up just south of the entrance. I make sure none are around because approaching from the south is the shortest way to go. Otherwise, I head north and cut back in, or go in at an angle sort of north by northeast. Once inside, there’s little to do but adjust quickly but not too quickly, or it turns into a game of pinball.

The aisles of the grocery store cause choke points, and shoppers who are blissfully unaware of their surroundings make it worse. I can go all the way around someone causing a jam in the middle of the soup aisle before they can figure out there’s a problem and move. Children are the worst, for they are the product of people who lack situational awareness, so they have no idea it exists, much like the kids who have never seen a blacksmith or a miller.

If human beings were magically turned into zebras on the Serengeti, the first lion to charge the herd could simply stop and wait. All of the zebras would run into one another, fight over who was going to be first, deliberately interfere with others, and some would just stand and stare off into space. In the wild, human beings would be extinct in about three days.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Schrodinger’s Barbara Anderson

The dream stayed in my mind, like the residue of honey in a refilled cup of coffee. It’s not there, not even the memory of the dream is there, nothing but something akin to a psychic aftertaste, something floating around in the mind like a speck of red dust in the air, reflected by sunlight for a moment in time, picked up by imperceptible currents in the room, before drifting back into the shadow near your closet.

It’s still there, it still exists, you know for a fact it does, but you also know you couldn’t find it, and by looking for it, by trying to define it, you would pollute and distort it, change it so completely as to destroy the vision entirely.

How can it be both there, not there, remembered, not remembered, forgotten, not forgotten, Schrodinger’s Cat, with your conscious being the radioactive isotope, that triggers the poison. Your subconscious doesn’t know if there was a dream, or if you dreamed there was a dream, but the if you look for it, you kill the dream.

Perhaps the same part of your mind that forgets people one millisecond after you’ve been introduced is responsible for remembering your dreams. It’s a faulty device, battered by television shows, bumper sticker politics, and Prosperity Religion. If you spent more time reading, you’re remember what you had dreamt in more details, and Barbra Anderson’s name after you met her.

You can feel it, can’t you? You know it’s there. You meet someone and you’re looking at her, she’s speaking to you, and her name was said out loud, you shook hands with her, and now you’re scrolling through names in your head without a road sign or a map to help.

Feels just like when you’re trying to remember a dream, doesn’t it?

When was the last time you did remember a dream? The dreamscape, the setting of the dream, was it familiar only while you were there, or it is a real place? The people, were they characters in your life, or did they only exist in your slumber? Perhaps there was fear, some creature that meant you harm, were you lost, were you missing someone, was there abject terror of death, fire, falling, bullets, bears, or Johnny with an ax?

Maybe that’s why we don’t remember dreams, it’s a self-defense mechanism keeping us from screaming during the day while we remember what happened in our sleep. And perhaps, for mechanisms we cannot quite comprehend, it’s the same reason we forget the names of strangers.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 1 Comment

Fleas for Sale

I went to a flea market today, a rather large one, and went early to avoid the rush. It was cooler than was comfortable, the wind was blowing, and the feeling of being out of place cut deeper than the cold.

The older woman selling honey growled the price out, her tone of voice suggesting anyone who wanted the honey badly enough would somehow discern the price, perhaps telepathically. Dressed for the Artic as she was, perhaps she feared a transaction might somehow weaken her defenses against the soon to arrive blizzard or distract her while a polar bear ambushed us both. Her gray hair was pulled back and stuffed into something that mostly resembled a hat, and her face was crinkled with deep grooves that spoke of poverty and bad choices with men who came into her life like trees falling onto a house. I moved on.

It’s a covered flea market, with a few enclosed shops, but mostly just a roof, with nothing to slow the wind down. Smokers with their cigarettes can be smelled a mile away, and some guy selling cheap tools is talking loud enough to be heard over the smoke.

“They ain’t gonna do it,” his voice rising with the power of his opinion, “I bet they ain’t, com’on, you bet me, they ain’t gonna do it,” and he takes his white cowboy hat off and waves it at imaginary betters in the air. He’s one of those big hat, big belly, big belt buckle men, with a shirt that’s red and white checkered, like someone stole a picnic tablecloth and tortured it with a sewing machine. The tools on the table, still in a package, are lightweight, no steel or iron, and they’ll break during hard work. But this is a man who is putting on a show, advancing on the would be customers like ants at a campground, who brought their own picnic tablecloth. Meanwhile the three guys he’s talking to, slowly back away, not gambling against his info. One of them gets far enough away to turn around and make a break for the next stall, and the other two now have an excuse to follow. Cowboy Hat Man snorts, and looks around for his next audience, but I’m on the move.

I was once good at this, navigating crowds, weaving in and out of people effortlessly, a shadow barely seen or heard or felt, but it’s been too long now. The Plague has sapped me of my invisibility. Stopping, sidestepping, waiting for people to move, my glide is gone, the people moving the wrong way at the wrong time, and collisions nearly occur.  

Another shop is selling confederate flags, but near the back, in plastic packages, not on the wall like they once did. There’s a flag from the old Soviet Union, hammer and sickle, and it’s not being flown either. More cheap tools, but this time power tools, deeply discounted, in case you need a power saw for one project, you’d likely get it. Machetes, two for ten dollars, or five-fifty for one, thin, cheaply processed metal, and you couldn’t hack your way out of your 70’s girlfriend’s pubic hair with that thing.

Used clothes, more clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes for sell, dresses, jeans, shoes, and even hats for sale. The jeans are going for twenty bucks, a green down jacket for twenty-five, and this morning that’s a bargain, and I wonder who owned that jacket, and why they sold it, and how the jacket came to be here.

A teenager, young girl, is sitting in a chair at a small table, not seeing me, not seeing anything at all. She’s the daughter or granddaughter of the shop owner, and if this girl was holding a gun on you it would be your last moment on earth and you would be certain.

Her eyes are boring a hole through the air, through everything there, the people, the used clothes, the treason rag, the flimsy machetes, the parking lot, the hostile honey salesperson, and nothing from the outside world can break through that stare.

I want to sit down next to her, and ask her why the stare. With someone who is a young teen, it could be social media, or it could be she’s trying to figure out why her body and mind are going through what they’re going through. It could be the cold boredom, endless, dirty, smokey, cold boredom, of used retail, cheap clothes off dead people sold to the dying. Or it could be worse, much worse, as she found a hidden camera in her bedroom, and her new stepfather is creepy. Tell her Mom about it? Not tell Mom? Tell social media, tell no one, silence encourages aggression, she already knows that, and that stare is trying to decide if she walks away right now, into the abyss of the world, would it be that much worse than what awaits her in her own home? The stare lazars its way through me, past the greasy food stands, past the shop selling boom boxes, past the used CDs, past the next state and the next country and into deep space, but she will find no help anywhere anymore.

Moving quickly now, the mojo is returning, and I dodge those who are milling around like cattle in a pen, grazing on anything that might be slightly interesting in the cold stockyard of the flea market. It’s time to go, time to get away from this place, and as I leave the old woman with the honey calls out, wanting my money, even though she rather not speak to me again. I pull out, another car pulls in behind me, and someone will buy fleas here today, I think.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Exit

I remember seeing Greg at Exit 16 for the first time. An odd sight, for there to be someone I knew, someone I had worked with, someone who I had drank with, and someone who was going to college at some point, living under the overpass of I-75. But there he was, sitting, waiting, and homeless.

There were drugs involved, also stealing, cheating people out of money, lying, and it was the lying that seemed to be the worst part of it. Greg became a living lie, with every word and every sentence based on creating a narrative that would somehow transfer money from someone else to his use. Greg and I had reached the logical conclusion to our friendship when he stole from me. Trust was no longer possible, and no longer feasible. But Greg had run out of friends entirely and run out of second chances with anyone he had ever known.

If there’s any truth in the story, Greg’s family had worked hard to get him into college, get him where no one in their family had ever been, and he lasted one year. Cocaine was Greg’s thing, because it represented a lifestyle he could only bear witness to by watching television. Greg and I both worked at Shoney’s, the one on Ashley Street, and I remember him telling me he wanted to be a cocaine dealer. Greg got into crack instead, and he stole his father’s truck, and then looted his family’s home, and sold everything he could put in the truck at a pawn shop. He did that to his girlfriend’s mother, having a yard sale at her house while she was at work. And he stole stuff from his roommates. They threw his stuff out into the yard, and Greg set his bed up in the yard, close to the street. I drove by when I heard about it, and sure enough, there was Greg lying on his bed, in the open, in the yard. The first big rain ended that, and Greg retreated to Exit 16.

For not the first, and not the last time, I stopped and picked Greg up, took him to get something to eat, and turned down every request he made for money, and that was a nonstop thing with Greg. The year was 1985 or maybe ’86. I moved away in 1992, and didn’t give Greg a second thought until I saw him at Exit 16 again, but this time it was 2004.

People who have lived on the road for a while, and I’m talking about those with substance abuse problems, have a smell. Not the unwashed smell of someone who has been working all day in the sun, but a sour smell, of chemicals and alcohol seeping out of their bodies. Frequent walking in the sun bakes them, dries them out, fries their already tormented skin, and they begin to look a lot older than they already are. Being homeless is stressful. There’s no telling who or what is going to happen to you. Greg was now missing teeth from fighting with other homeless people, and someone had thrown something out of a car window and hit him, or so he said. Lies, lies, and more lies, Greg had a narrative of his life as someone who just needed a little more help, just a little more, and he would change.

I’d buy Greg food but never give him money, and someone gave Greg a job about the time I found out he was still in this area. He got fired for panhandling during lunch, with his employer telling him not to lie to people about needing work when he was on his lunch break. The man fired Greg after one day.

I went a very long time not hearing from Greg, and not hearing anything about him. I worked two interstate construction projects, and met a guy who knew him, or claimed to, anyway. Finally, about five years ago someone called me to say Greg’s body had been found along I-75 in Florida. He was off the right of way, in a patch of trees and bushes, and died there, apparently. His body had decomposed to the point there was no way to identify it. Because he was considered homeless and not missing, there was no one out there looking for him, so the body was cremated, and that was that. The only way anyone ever knew who he was is they took X-rays of his teeth and that matched dental records when they finally got a match. I’m not sure how all that works. But his former girlfriend saw me one day at the gym and told me. Apparently, the ashes were already gone by the time anyone even knew Greg was dead.

I saw Susan again today, she saw me, but she was with her family and I know she didn’t want to talk about how I once fit into her life. I was a friend of her boyfriend, and I was there when he was working, and people trusted him. We went out and drank beer, shot pool, ate food we can’t eat anymore without gaining weight, and I remember Susan and I talking once time, about how odd it was that each individual in that tiny bar had come from somewhere else, yet we were all there, at that very point on Earth, at that very point in time, and it was all very unlikely, yet we were. Now, she and her husband are meeting the kids for coffee before church, and there are small people who look like grandchildren with them.

Somewhere out there, unlikely people are meeting for the first time, or seeing one another for the last time, and as unlikely as their meeting might be, it still occurred, and there may or they may not be, some memory of it stored in the brain of a person, or maybe ten. Then one day, one of those people might die along the interstate, thousands of people passing as a funeral procession, and no one knows how death came or where it went next. Like an endless stream, people in your life come and go, and then one day, the last person who remembers you will be gone, and the last person who remembers that person will die, too. And nothing you ever remembered will still be with here, at least not from your point of view.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 2 Comments

My Date With A Cannibal

She was an angry woman, someone who had been wronged, and clearly, she was one of those people who rather be anywhere else than where she was, no matter who she was with. I didn’t want to do the bar thing, so I signed up on Match and started trying to shed a divorce that had begun to stick to me like a second skin. We were like two in that, she and I. Neither of us knew it at the time, but what we had in common was invisible, and both of us, once we realized it, had to part forever.

We met at Books-a-Million, and from the first few minutes, I thought she was about to get up and walk out. But we had read enough books to find comfort in trying to figure out what else there might be. She wrote poetry, but rarely, and I wrote too much fiction. There was a movie we both wanted to see, so we sat in the dark and in silence, which is what movies are good for, in the final truth. After a while, we held hands and watched the credits roll.

“I hear there’s a good Mexican place in Quitman,” she said, and I offered to buy her dinner there. She followed me to the restaurant, and we drank Margaritas and listened to a couple sing slightly off key.

We said our goodbyes at her car, and she told me it had been a great time but it was the wrong man at the wrong time, and if it was okay, we needed to part ways. I had just paid a lot of money to be shut of a woman so I knew it was a gift to be able to simply walk away.

I pulled into my driveway and she pulled in behind me. “Let not talk about it, okay?” and we didn’t. We smoked a little pot she had, drank Scotch that I had, and very slowly, but most certainly, she allowed me to ease her into my bedroom.

About three in the morning, she got up and dressed by the light in the bathroom, and I propped up on one elbow and watched.

“Left at the driveway, right at the light in town, right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Don’t call me, please,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m married,” she said and neither of us spoke again as she left.

It was another couple of months, and I was still adrift in the sea of unhappy people looking for other unhappy people on computer screens, and a text popped up. She showed up at my house an hour or so later, and she looked happier, somewhat, but we still didn’t want to talk about it.

“I got divorced,” she said, “but I’m not looking for anything right now.”

“Why are you here?” I asked. I had almost fallen asleep.

“I thought you’d get a kick out what happened when I left here last time. I went home. I had been gone most of the day, most of the night, and when I walked into the house my husband was sitting in his chair playing some video game with three of his friends, just like they were when I left. None of them had so much as changed positions. I don’t think he realized I had been gone. I sat and watched them play, knowing they would be there, endless hours followed by endless hours. I propped my feet up on the arm of his chair and cleaned my nails by scraping them against my teeth. There were tiny pieces of your skin under my nails. I held each piece in my mouth, just letting it sit there a bit, then I swallowed them. Pieces of someone else inside of me, in more ways than one, and me just a couple of feet away from a man who wasn’t aware who I was anymore,” she said.

“That’s fucked up,” I said, fully awake now.

“That’s marriage,” she said, and I never saw her again.

Take Care,

Mike

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Four-Thirty AM

It’s just after four in the morning and for reasons unknown, sleep has abandoned me. Tis an odd thing, night is, for I can hear the sound of a car, or a truck, out there in the dark, tires whining on the road, and it’s not a noise that is always heard. The acoustics here differ from season to season, temperature to temperature, raining to dry, so it’s not just the very real and very human ability to ignore or to tune out. The pitch of the sound gets higher as the car, or truck, gets closer, then it fades away, someone heading towards Quitman, or perhaps they’ll be home before then. Good to be home at this time of day, or at least somewhere you want to be.

She’s still bothers me, that young woman. She’s still stuck in my mind, still hanging around, and as of yet I haven’t had a chance to put her to fiction. She’s still too real, too immediate, and still unknown. It was 2009, and I was working nights on the Interstate. The shifts were ten hours, at a minimum, and sometimes a lot longer. A four month project had morphed into an eight month project, and the summer nights were getting longer. I was tired, more tired than I realized I could be, but I was driving home, at last, and now, sitting here, I wonder if that night someone heard my truck, and wondered where I was going. I lived twenty-five miles from the office where my truck had to be parked, and that morning, close to the time it is right now, just three and a half miles from home, there was a car in the middle of the road.

Deer wander out into the road, and they get hit by cars, and it’s usually catastrophic for both animal and vehicle. The deer are usually killed, if they’re lucky, and this one was very dead. Its body lay open in the night, steaming in the cooler air, eyes wide open in horror, and the front end of the car looked as bad. But the driver was a young woman. In a different light, she might have been pretty, or cute, or attractive in some way. There was no reason for her not to be, except her eyes. There was something about the way she looked at me, looked at the deer, or maybe she carried something inside that gave her that looked; wide eyed, intense, yet at the same time, there was something else there, rage, wrath, an anger, something I still cannot define, meth maybe, or maybe something else that I’ve never run into.

“You have to get me to Tallahassee,” she said. Those were the first words she spoke, and in my younger days, I might have done it, just to see what would happen. But after a ten hour shift on the interstate, I wasn’t looking for crazy. I told her I would call 911 for her.

“You fucking asshole,” she screams at me, the sound incredibly loud in the night. And pulls her hair back with both hands, stalks back to the car, and then back to me again.

See the flashlight in the photo? It’s like a relic from a different age now, long, large, steel casing, and heavy. Four D cell batteries, like no one uses anymore, add even more mass, and there’s a reason cops once carried these, other than illumination; they make great clubs. Whatever she was on, what she might have been, or whatever she intended, I was pretty sure hitting her in the face with that flashlight would keep her off of me. Think about it. Here’s man who only wants to go home and get some rest, if not sleep. He stops to help a young woman. She’s all strung out or possessed. Suddenly, a man who has never hit a woman in his entire life, is thinking this might be the one chick that does something so weird he’s entering the realm of physical violence with her.

“That close enough,” I tell her, and she stops, and looks at me, as if she just noticed I was there.

“You can tow my car to Tallahassee,” the woman says. Her accent isn’t right. She isn’t Southern, but I can’t nail it down.

“Not about to, ma’am, but I’ll give you a ride into Quitman, or I’ll call 911,” I tell her, but there is no way in hell she’s getting into my truck.

“I’ll pay you when we get there,” and this is a demand, not a request. She’s restless, pacing, tossing her hair out of her eyes, her fingers moving like the fuses of lit firecrackers, and I plant my right foot. This is going to end poorly.

“You need to get me to Tallahassee, motherfucker,” and her voice rises again.

“Look,” I tell her, “two options, I leave you here, or I call 911, and leave you here,” I tell her, “but you see that security light about half a mile on the right? That’s the Andersons. They have three black labs. They’ll kill you if you go up there. Okay?” And I take a couple of steps back.

“Fuck you,” she snarls, but she gets back into her car.

Know when it’s time to go, and then go a minute before that time. I walk back to the truck and pull around her.

I call 911 when I get home, and they tell me they’ve just got a call from her.

 

Chances are, the sound from the tires is someone going home, or maybe going to work. I spent most of my adult life doing that, going to work early, coming back home late, and I hope like hell I’m done with that now. But somewhere out there, are very strange people, and maybe one of them is that young woman, eleven years older now. If she survived herself, and whatever else she was doing, she might be pushing thirty now. Maybe even older. I find myself wondering what she was doing, what drug, what substance, to change her like that, or maybe that was her authentic true self, but I strongly doubt it.

What if she’s looking for me?

The sound of tires are gone now, and in their place is the sound of that night, the engine cooling and creaking, the drip of fluids out of the car’s dead engine, the sound of insects buzzing, and the sound of her footsteps as she paced back and forth. I have to get up and write now. For whatever unknown Demons might have stalked that woman, I know which ones have their claws in me. I have to write. This is where I have to be towed.

Take Care,

Mike

 

 

Posted on by Mike Firesmith · 2 Comments

Abernathy

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Someone I once met bought a huge roll top desk for five hundred bucks at an estate sale. Took four grown men to get it out of the house, and back into his. The thing was a monster, a small cottage could have been built out of the wood in that desk. I’ve always wanted one, but at the same time, I’m not sure a desk, any desk, is worth five hundred dollars. No, I tend to drift towards going to estate sales at homes that might have a hardback copy of “Dune” in great condition. Or a box full of paperbacks for a dollar.

I’ve tried, really, truly, I’ve tried to stop collecting books, ever since 2006, when I gave about three thousand of them away. I had stacks of books all over the damn house, and finally released them back into the wild, giving them all to the Brooks County Library. But I’m drawn to books. They are the only source of manmade magic to believe in. Everywhere there’s a journey there’s a search for books. Who cares what a woman looks like, really, if she’s read the right books. If you can sit across from a woman at a table and she tells you that “Stranger in a Strange Land” changed her life, you can go anywhere with her, and be happy.

The hand painted sign read, “Estate Sale”, and who paints a sign for an estate sale, and that’s enough for me to go in. All of the stuff  on the screened in porch, which is dipping forward just enough to tell, and there isn’t much of what there is. Clothes, that will be eventually donated, a stack of vinyl records, mostly very old R&B and gospel, and a collection of kitchen knickknacks litter the porch. There’s a pair of boots older than I was at the time. A worn copy of some book without a cover has a tag on it reading “5 cents” and it is time to go.

There’s a suit, and the material looks good, really good, and I stop to examine it. It’s old, very old, thin, and it had seen its better days decades ago.

“Abernathy,” the man sitting in a chair at the door says, and for a moment I didn’t realize he was speaking to me.

“Oh?” I encourage him. I shouldn’t, but why not?

“His mama named him that, wanted him to be a preacher, but it never took,” the man tells me. “She bought him that suit when he got out of high school. Gave him that suit and a bible and told him that God would speak to him.”

“Did God speak to him?” I ask.

“If’n he did, Ab didn’t hear, and if he heard he didn’t listen, Ab liked to play drums but the drums didn’t like Ab,” and the man laughed. “Didn’t have a musical nut in his sack.”

“How old was he?”

“Ab lived to be eighty, but mostly he died ten years before that,” the man stood up and stretched, keeping on hand on the door jamb to balance. “because them doctors had him doped up on pills and things. Ab couldn’t remember his own name, forgot about music, he weren’t never no good but he sho liked to listen. Had him a band he played in once, and they never was good enough to charge money. Background noise, something to hear, but nothing to listen to a’tall, is how I called’em.”  The man sat down and stared at the wooden floor. He could hear the music now, through much younger ears, and even though it wasn’t great music, or even good music, it was something that glued his past together.

“They played in this very house, had all the drums jammed in so tight Ab could hardly move, not that it hurt’im none. They played loud, and we drank to help, and it did some, and he always wore that suit. Made him look like he was gonna go to a funeral for the music, I said that one night, and everybody laughed so hard Ab stopped playing, and he never picked up a stick again. Never wore it again, that suit, never put it back on. Took his drums, and all that shit that went with it, to the pawn shop, and drank it away in less than a week.”  The man stared back into the house now, and I could hear it; terribly play music played far too loud, for drunk friends who were just trying to find an excuse to be there.

“Folks kidded Ab, they were mean about it, and said he once got arrested for playing music too loud, but the judge had heard Ab play, and said it wasn’t music,” the man laughed hard at that, and slapped his knee. “Ab took it hard, he did, he ain’t played a lick since that night, and he ain’t listened to no music like he once did. But the day he died his ex come over and played them records over there one by one, until Ab passed. Then she put’em down where she found’em and she walked out, again, and didn’t never come back no more.” The man stopped speaking for a while, and looked up, to see if I was still there.

“Good woman, Dorothy Ann was. Ab and her had two young’ens and they didn’t grow up to be preachers either. Both dead before they was old enough to drive. Wild things, went off and stole a car, wrecked it and burned. Dot’Ann done left after that. Came back to see Ab die, but it was more than that. She saw the last of her babies that day, too, both of’em spittin’ image of their daddy.” The man was staring at the warped and twisted porch wood now. It was time for me to leave, and I knew it.

 

End.

Posted on by Mike Firesmith

Cold

Back a few years ago, we had a period of cold weather that lasted for about a month. The pond had ice on it every day, at least in the parts shaded by trees, the pipe in the pump house burst, and it was ungodly cold all the damn time.  This week, we’ve had three days of freezing weather, twenty-eight degrees as a low, and it looks like that’s it for the month of January, 2020. The gnats are back, the mosquitoes were really bad last week, and there’s grass high enough to mow in the yard right now.

The middle of last May was incredibly hot. Not just warm, but triple digit heat in the day, high humidity, and night that were unbearable without AC.

 

I woke up at four this morning, couldn’t get back to sleep, and decided to get up, and write. Since I retired, there’s been this reoccurring theme from some people that we humans have to have a schedule, and we have to have a routine, because that’s the sort of animals we are. But I haven’t one in over three months, and I’m not looking for one, either. I like the idea of getting out of bed when I can’t sleep and writing. I’m not late for a damn thing, am I?

 

If I don’t go out with the dogs they’ll U turn, and pretend they peed on the grass, and right after they eat they’ll really have to go. So I go out, in freezing weather, to make sure they pee. They’re all curled up tight and sleeping again right now. But the stars were incredible in the cold early morning darkness, and an orange crescent moon was slung low in the southern sky, barely awake. I couldn’t get a decent photo of it, I wish I had either the equipment or the knowledge for such work, but I rather hone my writing skills than learn photography this morning. The urge to write right now seems urgent.

 

Decades ago, a few years before I took the job that I would retire from, I worked as a circulation manager for the Valdosta Daily Times. One night I was riding with one of the carriers and saw the moon, a low slung crescent in the night sky, and that was all that mattered at the moment, to see the moon. It’s important to pay attention to what the moon is doing, what the moon is saying at the moment, and acknowledge that everyone on Earth who has ever lived, and had the gift of sight, has seen the same moon. It’s a commonality of humanity. It should be. We should all take time to moon gaze, and it see it as an undying memorial to our endurance. The same magic that early humans felt, long before we landed there, I feel when I look at the slightly orange crescent caught in the branches of the trees around the pond. The magic seeped into my bones as a child and never left me. I feel sorry for those people who never look up, never stop and stare, and never feel the moon.

 

The crescent will be smaller tomorrow morning. It’s waning, and soon will be a sliver, or a smile, depending on the position. There will be nights of near total darkness and the stars will shine brightly, then the moon will return, again. It matters not at all if I am here to see it, for many more people who stood and enjoyed the view are not here.

 

Yesterday, I noticed it was six in the afternoon, and not quite yet dark. The days are getting longer, and they have been since the last part of December, but only now has it become noticeable. The sun is also rising further south than before, and now, after enjoying the sunlight reflecting off the moon, I see the eastern sky begin to brighten somewhat. Out in the ocean, on some boat, someone is watching the sunrise, but I must wait awhile yet.

 

For some reason, I cannot explain to you, a memory summoned to the surface, of a young woman I knew, who liked being in relationships, but also liked cheating. Her boyfriend caught her, confronted her, and she denied it, knowing as long as he didn’t actually see her doing anything, deny, deny, deny. They were in bed having this conversation, and he held her down, handcuffed her hands behind her back, duct taped her feet together, and then tossed her into the trunk of her car. At that point, she was truly afraid he was going to kill her. He took her out in the country, went down a field road, and dumped her on the ground, and drove away. It was below freezing and no matter how loud she screamed, no one came.

An hour so later, he came back, brought her clothes with him, uncuffed and untied her, and he drove her to the police station and got out of the car, and told her he was walking home. She sat there a while, then picked him up, and they stayed together for years after that.

 

One night she told me that while she was in the field, her naked body lying on the freezing ground, and she was wondering which worst case scenario might occur and cause her untimely death, she looked up at the sky and realized the moon was new, and the stars overhead looked incredible. And for a brief moment in her life, despite the fact that truly believed she was going to die, in one fashion or another, she realized that in that one moment, she defined her ability to rise above her own mortality.

 

I had never had anyone tell me anything more perfectly beautiful in my life.

 

Take Care,

Mike